While most newspapers have become more compact in recent years, The Drawbridge bucks the trend. A quarterly printed on a parchment whose girth commuters haven't encountered since Pooter was sauntering down the Holloway Road, it's a journal that thinks bigger than most, and in more ways than one. Boasting a ready-scribbled-on Sudoku grid, artwork by Joel Sternfield and David Shrigley and writing from Gerry Adams, Noam Chomsky and John Berger, there's intellectual meat here but no paucity of visual and verbal wit either. Failure is this number's theme, and DBC Pierre (who, let's face it, has crested some lows) gives advice on defeating its life-sapping effects. "Play backgammon," the reformed fraudster and Booker prize-winner counsels; "play it drunk, play it high, play it sober, deploy the dice in every mood and before and after good, bad and bent sex." (How this might assist anyone failing to get any sex is never quite explained, but it certainly sounds the way to go around exam time.) For letterology life coach L Vaughan Spencer, however, it's simply a matter of spelling. "Change a letter," he writes, and "fail becomes sail". (By the same token, "sail" could just as easily then turn into "soil", which doesn't sound nearly so impressive.) But as Massimo Genghini notes, we always do well to remember that it's a relative term - Hitler's failure was, after all, democracy's gain.

It is a candid writer who admits that he has pleasant memories of acts the depiction of which could lead to prosecution for obscenity. Such a confession appears in Anthony Banks's editorial in the latest issue of Succour, a journal of poetry and new fiction, which in this instance is dedicated to the notion of "the obscene". (Banks's Proustian log of transgressions, like getting an erection to a print of Degas's "L'Etoile", frequently beats his recall of contemporary literary outrages - as far as I remember, sections of London's Bangladeshi community took umbrage with Monica Ali and not Ali Smith, as he maintains here.) The challenge, he believes, in an increasingly desensitised society, is for writers to "draw attention to the obscenity of ordinary life", and his contributors make pretty good stabs at doing so. Stories from Cathi Unsworth, Matt Thorne and Luke Kennard, respectively, take in London bus journeys, couples utilising candles in their sex games and the dilemma of dealing with a bigot at a party. And David L Hayles' closing offering, a spoof letter from the author crying off due to fears over the long-term consequences for his career, rounds the whole thing off nicely.